


Never Leave

by zeldadestry



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Community: 100_women, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:10:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This world is a sewer, but you were the one light of hell.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Leave

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt 84, "there", for 100_women fanfic challenge

His pain is becoming worse.

He tries to hide the truth from her, deny it, but she knows.

 

They share the same bed, some nights. He curls around her just as he did when she was small and needed nothing in this world so much as the comfort he gave her. Even the protection he offered, the safety, did not mean as much as his affection.

She turns her sleepy gaze to the sliding glass doors of this room but the view they offer her is not nearly enough. “Do you ever wonder why they so rarely put windows in their ceilings here?” she asks him.

“You want as much as you can of the blue sky during the day,” he says, “and to see as many stars as possible at night.”

Yes, he understands her, and is the only one who ever has. She rolls onto her back so she can look at him. “I remember your voice, still, the way it was before.” He reaches a hand out towards her face but stops as soon as he recognizes his own impulse, because he completes no action unless it is one she requests. “Yes,” she says, and takes his hand into her own, holds it to her cheek. “I miss it, sometimes,” she says, but regrets the confession when she sees the flash of hurt in his eyes. “But all that matters is that we are here now, so never mind my foolishness.” She strokes her fingers along the patches of skin that are not obscured by the mask, the delicate damp softness of his eyelids. “Bend your head,” she asks, and draws him to her breasts, cradles him there as he so often did for her, so that she could hear his heart beating and know there was still hope, still a chance. “It’s alright,” she says, talking half to herself, half to him. “Your voice, as it is now, I have learned to find as beautiful as it was before. It is yours, after all, and I could not ever mistake it for another.”

 

She has never loved a man. It is no surprise, considering what she knows men did to her mother. He spared her from seeing it, her face hidden against his chest, he kept her from hearing the screams, his hands cupped around her ears as soon as they started.

If she could love, she knows he would be the only one she would.

“I lived in the pit for too long,” he told her, once. “So long that everything that came before, in my life, is now lost to me.”

She dreams sometimes that she meets him in a different century, an older one. She passes him on the street, perhaps, in a city of ruins, the remains of ancient Rome, yes, somewhere like that. 

And in this story, she would be one who never lived underground, who had only known the sun on her skin every day, and he- he would be as he was in that one moment when she saw his face. She remembers his smile upon her and the tenderness in his eyes, and how they remained even as the crowd surrounded him, drew him down into their mass to destroy him. 

He would take her into his arms and kiss her, as ordinary people, weaklings and fools, do. 

 

“When I am with Wayne,” she tells him, as she finishes dressing, “I will need to make him believe that I care for him.” Bane sits at the foot of her bed, staring down at the floor, his hands in fists. “Do you know how I will do that?” He does not respond. “I will think of you.” She walks over to him and kisses the top of his bowed head. Then she sits down on his lap and wraps her arms around his waist. “Hold me,” she pleads, and he presses her tightly to him. 

 

She wakes up crying. “I hate everyone,” she tells him. “Everyone but you.”

“This world is a sewer,” he answers. “But you were the one light of hell.”

“I can never forget- and so there can be no life for me here, not really. Sometimes I wish you had killed me.”

He is quiet for a long time. “I could not,” he finally says. 

“You thought about it?”

“I could not,” he repeats.

She takes his hand into her own. “I understand,” she says. 

“Isn’t there anything here for you?”

She leads him up the stairs, to the very top of the building, takes him outside on the roof. “The entire sky.”

“Yes,” he agrees, and they lie on their backs, side by side, the canopy of stars above them.

 

When he was still imprisoned, he dared to imagine that she, wherever she was, was happy. 

What kept him alive, after the attack, was the possibility that she might someday need his help again. Once or twice, he even dared to imagine that perhaps one day he would see her return his smile. He could not feel anything but joy as he watched her escape, even as dozens of hands clutched at him, seeking only to deal pain.

She wept when she first saw him again, she collapsed at his feet. He crouched down to meet her there. He gestured at the mask, wished she could see his attempt to laugh it all off. “My dear, it looks so much worse than it is.” 

He knew what to do when she cried. It was perhaps the easiest and best thing he would ever do, to pet her hair and rub across her shoulders until she quieted, as he had when she was a child, his child. 

 

He dreams, the night before the day when the deteriorating bomb will explode, regardless of whether or not they detonate it, that they are back in the pit. The only difference is that now they are the jailers. 

He wakes, wipes the sweat from his brow. 

We never left, he realizes. I saved her, I did, but we are still trapped.

 

She has always touched his skin, she has not shied away from the human parts of him left to see. And, this last time, in this last moment together, when she touches the mask, as she never has before, he can speak no words to her, can only look back into her eyes and believe she knows, understands. 

I am nothing but your servant. Whatever you have asked, I have given my all to provide and, if we are, now, to die, and to bring them down into the pit with us, then, yes. If it is your will, then it shall be done. 

 

She waits for the blast, she wants to hear it, feel it, be blinded by it.

But her body hurts, pain presses in all around her, as it must have so often for him. My friend, she tries to shape the words, but no part of her mouth answers her orders. Say my name, she thinks.

Talia. 

I would have forgotten even my name if not for you.

She should not have left him.

She should not ever have left him.

No.

She did not.

We are dying together, she reminds herself. And above us is the sky, we are dying beneath this same sky, my friend. My friend. Good bye.


End file.
